Silicon Valley Moves Closer to a World Without Jobs

Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos’s plan to expand his digital dominion to the physical world continues apace. Not content with opening traditional brick-and-mortar storefronts alone, the e-commerce giant on Monday unveiled an 1,800-square-foot convenience store in Seattle that sells snacks, staples like milk and bread, pre-made meals, and meal kits. But unlike a normal 7-Eleven, Amazon’s store lacks both cashiers and checkout counters. The store—which is called Amazon Go and is currently only available for Amazon employees, though it will open to the public next year—uses sensors to track the items customers take out of the store, and charges them accordingly.

“We asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout?” Amazon says on its official Go site. “Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go?”

Amazon is simultaneously working on another convenience store concept in which customers would order online and pick up groceries from their cars, using license-plate-reading technology to help facilitate faster checkouts. (Two such stores are under construction in Seattle, The New York Timesreports.) Amazon Go, on the other hand, will still resemble the traditional shopping experience in most ways: Customers will walk into a store, grab a cart, and browse for groceries. But instead of waiting in line to pay a cashier, or using a temperamental self-checkout machine, shoppers will simply walk out of the store when they’re done. A combination of sensors, artificial intelligence, and machine learning—what Amazon calls “Just Walk Out” technology—will determine what’s in customers’ carts and charge them accordingly.

The benefits to Amazon are obvious: the company can collect loads of data about its users, based on their purchase history and the items they browse in-store, which in turn allows the company to serve more personalized recommendations online.

While Amazon has already supplemented many of its warehouse employees with machines, Amazon Go stores will almost certainly require the presence of some number of human staff. Still, Amazon appears to be moving decisively toward replacing workers with automation wherever possible. Since 2014, The Los Angeles Timesreports, Amazon has added 50,000 warehouse workers but also more than 30,000 robots, causing hiring to slow at its warehouses. Nor is Amazon the only tech company with plans to eventually automate as many jobs as possible. Earlier this year, Uber bought an automated trucking start-up called Otto, which recently completed its first delivery—a beer run—largely without the assistance of its human driver. Although Otto has described its self-driving technology as a way to help truckers on long cross-country trips, Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick hasn’t been shy in the past about his vision to eliminate commercial drivers in the future. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car—you're paying for the other dude in the car,” he said in 2014. “When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is sanguine about a future where millions of retail or trucking jobs have been replaced by machines. A growing number of tech leaders, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman among them, have begun advocating for a universal basic income: a guaranteed minimum stipend that the government would pay to everyone, ensuring some cushion as technological change roils the labor market, and allowing workers to develop new skills. Altman might want to start by focusing on the 3.5 million cashiers in America, who could soon join the 3.5 million truck drivers in having to worry about a robot taking their job. That economic anxiety is part of the reason why Donald Trump, who promised to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas, won the presidential election last month. But outsourcing is only part of the picture. In the end, it won’t be globalization, but automation, that will transform the U.S. economic landscape. Look no further than your friendly local Amazon Go store, coming soon to a neighborhood near you, to see that future in action.